I was reading an article today and it covered some very valid points on user experience with WordPress. One of its points was that the profile should go under the Dashboard menu. I like this idea but not sure if it could be done.

Interesting Qs. +1 But please don't forget to make process on your older Qs. Anyway: Basically those are meta boxes, so you could do whatever you want with them. Just take a look inside core into the default dashboard meta boxes.
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kaiser♦Feb 21 '12 at 16:28

The Dashboard Widgets API (added in WP 2.7) makes it very simple to add new widgets to the administration dashboard. Doing so requires working knowledge of PHP and the WordPress Plugin API, but to plugin or theme authors familiar with hooking actions and filters it only takes a few minutes and can be a great way to make your plugin even more useful.